Letters to David
Irving on this Website

Unless
correspondents ask us not to, this Website
will post selected letters that it
receives, and invite open
debate.

Leor
Leonof
Israel rather likes the works of David Irving,
Wednesday, September 8, 2004

Irving
Fan in the Middle East

"HE penetrated through the dim
mist of thousands of years and transformed the
historical memory of the dead past into a living
reality" -- This is the praise that Adolf
Hitler gave to his teacher Leopold
Poetsch in his book Mein Kampf.

Mike
Oldfield of British Columbia adds
this postscript (Tuesday, August 17, 2004):
"When I did my last driving tour of the
western United States in 1994, I found that
whenever I stayed in a motel that was run by
East Indians, the rate they charged me for an
overnight stay was always higher than the
rate quoted for that particular motel in the
American Automobile Association's guidebook.
Somehow I don't think it was a coincidence.
"

DAVID
IRVING writes:

THE "dagoes"
reference was to Javier Solana, below, a
Spaniard; and a NATO mass-murderer at that. I do
not use milk-toast language about people like
him.

The reference to Asian
hotel-keepers is frank, honest, travel advice to
others, as in: "If you find a hotel in the USA
managed by an Asian, drive on." It is nothing to
do with racism, merely a realistic travel hint.
In my experience -- and I drove 15,000 miles
around the entire United States since November
-- Asian-managed hotels are dirty, poorly
maintained (bugs!), and being slowly run down.

The
light bulbs have been replaced by 40-watt bulbs
throughout. The coffee machines have been
removed. The soap bars could hide under a
37¢ postage stamp. There will always be
exceptions, true, but I did not find even one,
and I don't believe in mincing my language. When
you go out in the world, on the road, in
farflung towns and cities, as I often do, you
pick up a few worldly-wise tips about hotels
like those above: I pass them on; it is open to
others like yourself, who have perhaps led more
sheltered lives, to ignore them if you want to,
to go out there, and make the same mistakes that
I used to.

Politically-correct
Miami used to refuse to put up street signs
diverting tourist traffic away from the city's
unsafe (i.e., Black) areas. It took a couple of
very nasty incidents for them to change that
policy and erect idiot-proof "sunshine" icons to
channel arriving tourists safely to the right
districts. One German family took a wrong
turning from the airport in a rental car (which
in those days were all recognizable by the "Z"
in their license tag) and were dead within five
minutes. As said, overweening political
correctness then took a back seat to realism.
Tourists who've been harrassed do not return;
that German family did not either.

In England they now
say: A Conservative is a Liberal who has been
mugged. I appreciate that political
correctness has a set of rules of its own; but
respect for ones fellow humans does not oblige
us to be quiet about their shortcomings --
particularly when you are a weary traveler, on
the road.

Incidentally, since I
wrote those lines about American motel system, I
have received very many letters from others
quietly expressing the same puzzlement about its
gradual collapse. Race does not come into it: if
the common factor were seven-feet tall hotel
managers, or two-headed hotel managers, I would
say just the same about them; in this case, the
common factor is that they are recent Asian
immigrants, and seemingly out of their depth in
the culture of the United States.